


Kingdom Come

by Toroto



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: F/M, Reader-Insert, Slow Burn, character exploration, not actually dead
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-07-01
Updated: 2017-07-01
Packaged: 2018-11-21 22:02:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,492
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11366511
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Toroto/pseuds/Toroto
Summary: In 2035, the Omnica Corporation began creating the Omniums, robotic artificial intelligence that would equalize employment inequality and become a new work force for the world. In 2041, the robots began to be distributed across the world, doing the jobs no one wanted to do and helping those that no one else wanted to help. At the time, you were so proud to say you helped build the intelligence behind the system. You were glad to do something to help the world. In 2044, the Omnium were recalled for malfunction and Omnica Corporation collapsed. You thought it was over, your creations failed. In 2046, the Omnium, calling themselves the Omnics, rose up again, all at once.This is not a story of the Omnic Crisis, though perhaps it would be simpler that way. No, this is about what happens after to one person, seeing the results of their creations first hand and what the world has become now.





	Kingdom Come

_ Not like this, please, not like this. _

_You wanted to scream those words out at the top of your lungs, to cry and shiver and weep the tears that were burning at the back of your eyes, wanting to be set free. You wanted to break down and curl up into a little ball. You wanted to run, as far away as possible from here and never, ever, look back. Instead, however, you clamped your teeth down hard into the side of your hand, the taste of blood filling your mouth as you try so very hard not to make a noise._

_All around you, the sound of flames flickered at anything flammable. Crashing steel against brick rang throughout the building, the sound of footsteps crunching against the crumbling flooring of the hallways and stairwells. Cries of pain that were not your own echoed through the building, distant but not unrecognizable to you. The echoed voiced of coworkers, friends, people just earlier today you talked to without any concern for the safety you all shared, now left you shaking so badly you could barely control yourself._

_You bit down harder, teeth digging into flesh, far past the point of leaving marks. A small self-inflicted wound was worth the price of your silence and thus, your life._

_If they couldn’t find you, they would just move on, right?_

_That’s the idea, at least._

_Your back was pressed as close to the wall as you could, the toppled remains of several lab tables and desks acting as practically a makeshift igloo that you had crawled your way inside. The explosion that had been set off on this end of the building caused most well-kept office tables, lab equipment, and furniture to be strewn about. If you couldn’t get out, might as well try to hide._

_You had always been small, your diminutive frame resulting in the playful teasing of your siblings growing up. The smallest of the litter, even if you were rightly the middle child. In this one instance, however, you were glad you didn’t tower above head and you praised the fact that you couldn’t reach the top shelf. Your height and small stature let you crawl under into what you only hoped would hide you from the metal monsters clanking inevitably toward you._

_How had it come to this anyway? You had only wanted to do good for humanity, how had it turned so very wrong?_

\---------

“What’s the projected finish for the comparison analysis?” A voice cried over your shoulder, causing you to glance sideways only briefly. Your fingers never left the keyboard, lips between your teeth as you focus.

“Five minutes. Which makes sense, considering I told you ten minutes, five minutes ago,” You grumble loudly, not trying to hide your sarcastic retort from the man who you could physically feel breathing down your neck.

“I’ll give you that but just hurry! I want to try this version out!” Kyle’s voice was eager as he leaned over your shoulder, eyes peering at the lines of software code that you were finishing up at this moment. Everything you had been working on for the last several months bubbled down to all those lines of text that just scrolled past both of your gaze. A working prototype of automated, self-analyzing, functional AI system; the idea alone should excite you just thinking about it. The idea of a robot straight out of an old comic book, the crazy things your father might spout about being in one of the super hero movies he saw when he was younger in the 2000s. The dream of human existence, a semi-pertinent form of creating life beyond life;

That was what this company was founded on. Omnica Corporation, a place for genius mechanics, scientists, programmers, and engineers to come together to help the world through technology. At least, that was the pitch they gave you on the day they hired you, fresh out of high school. They were going to be pioneers to the industry and make a change to the world. You still remember the man who did your interview, shaking your hand with the biggest and cheesiest of smiles, promising to help you help the world.

You weren’t delusional of course, you knew it was a job, but it was a fun one. You got to do what any computer geek would dream of and have the budget to boot. It was more a matter of what you could offer to the world but also help the company. Well, you worked wonders in programming so the logical answer was to find something that would balance your ideals and dreams with the structured system of numbers, codes, and figures you were so used to.

The solution: they assigned you to the artificial intelligence team, nicknamed Omnium. Your job: create an artificial intelligence robot that boost the manufacturing capability of most factories while also balancing economic injustice of the world. Basically, create a robot that would do the things humans did not want to do and help the people who no one else seemed to want to help.

The idea was simple, the concept not so much. Months flew by before you even had a good established place to start. The team was a fifty people wide just in the programming department alone and nothing ever seemed to get done on time or how you wanted it. You had to build a robot with a concept of time, with a belief system that aligned with the human reality. It was an artificial intelligence but it needed to be malleable enough to be altered and changed depending on what job it was given. Building the robot itself would be easy, Omnica had essentially already created programmable robotics with base codes that followed the orders they were assigned. What they needed, however, was a semi-independent entity that could morph to an environment.

You remember someone once groaning about how “It needs to be human without being human. We are basically being told to create a weird version of a human brain here.” And honestly that wasn’t too far off.

It began with the idea of a central intelligence neural network, created as a mind that the stemming robotic AI would have access to in designated segments. The best idea they had to begin with was to data scan one of their coworker’s brains to try to understand a neural network and replicate it digitally. What they ended up with, you recall, several months later, was a rather sluggish, digitalized version of a computer geek who enjoyed burritos and watching reruns of twenty year old shows like Game of Thrones on the weekend. Not ideal but a start.

One idea led to another, one path followed progressively to the next, and it took over five years to sufficiently make a working prototype with all its failsafe’s and back up strategies. The team had narrowed down to ten over the course of those years, the fifty separating to other jobs, other departments, growing more specialized.

And now here you were, finishing up the data analysis and comparison programs to what might be, god only hopes, to be a final, though unpolished, version of the central AI system, codename, the IRIS.

You lean back with a sigh, glancing at Kyle behind you as you stretch. “I’ve been sitting here for six hours now trying to speed this process along. Don’t get me started with all that shit.” His excitement was contagious, of course, but you could only get so pumped after all this time. There was always something else that had to be added, another set of instructions you had to make that would take weeks. You honestly believed that this one would be the same as the rest. Ambition was one thing but this was attempt number several hundred and it had been several years of your life now.

“It’s done. You want to run test run it while I go grab some coffee?” You yawn as you push yourself away from the keyboard, glancing towards the shaggy headed man to you right. It might seem callous to not even watch the initial testing but even if it load up actually functioned, critical analysis of the AI could take anywhere up to months before it would be approved. There was no reason to get overly hyped up right now when one error would send them back to the start.

“Yeah, sure. You seem to need it…”

~~~~~~~~

Looking back, you would be genuinely a bit sad that you weren’t there for that start up testing. That the final pre alpha program ended up being the one where you were sipping a coffee in a café several streets down as the midafternoon lull surrounded you.

You still remembered that day pretty clearly though, the happiness on Kyle’s face as you went back and he said everything seemed to be running smooth. You remember how easily the next several weeks went by, to all of the programmer’s surprise. No hiccups with this attempt, the IRIS seemed to be able to fully copy and change the descendant intelligence, to respond and interact without any staggering in the system. It was still only allowed access to the knowledge Omnica wanted it to have but really, it had free reign of most of the internet. It followed all that the laws of robotics set into place; it saw the past of humanity and did not judge, only accepted and preformed its duty.

The plan was perfect, it worked.

Another year passed of planning and development before the systems were launched to market and you took pride in the fact that your name stood, at the age of twenty four, as an intelligence programmer for the Omnica Corporation, Kyle by your side through all six of those years. You remember him telling you once that if he could accomplish this he would leave a name for his grandchildren’s grandchildren to remember. You honestly hoped at the time that that would be the case.

Three years later, things began to crumble that dream of remembrance away. Perhaps the idea had been too ambitious, perhaps Omnica was too good to be true. Maybe it was a lot of both. Around the world, small errors in reasoning began to crop up with the intelligence. Nothing like killing a man, more like various branch offspring AI would sometimes refuse to do a job they had been assigned. The tasks weren’t immoral, dig a ditch, work in this factory, build this type of home, but every now and then, an entire shipment of robotics would malfunction.

If it had been a simple method of the AI had gone rogue that would be one thing. You had considered this. Every nerd knows you can’t leave an artificial intelligence without some kind of kill code or back up plan. But it was something only the creators would really know how to do, the ten that worked on the project, and the Omnica Corporation themselves. But it never came down to that. It never needed to come down to that. The robots only did good things here; they only helped. They were the equalizer to humanity. If anything in their code was wrong, it was the developers fault, not the AI.

Omnica, however, was built of humans, however, and flawed beyond measure. As the AI and the Omnium continued to malfunction with no determined reason, the corporation began to disintegrate from the inside out. From what you knew, someone far above your paygrade, possibly at the very top, caused a chain of corporate fraud that had been following the company for nearly a decade, long before you arrived.

There was nothing you could do to stop it either as you watched all your hard work began to crumble underneath your fingertips. The Omniums were immediately recalled as the corporation went belly up, all of you laid off and the entire establishment shut down. From something such as corporate fraud, an empire slowly died. Omnica was no more.

Really, that company had been all you knew. You had joined after high school, you didn’t even go to college. They had seen a genius in you and had taught you all you might want to know, giving you free reign to thrive in an actual working environment.

Now, however, there was nothing left of the company or your claim to success. You didn’t change the world, you created something that clearly had an expiration date. The Omnium’s malfunction, the error in the original code, it must have been something all of you had overlooked.

Even now, that still haunted you. You wondered often if you could have prevented the corporation’s demise had you just been more thorough. At least they hadn’t gone out and started a war, right? Your hopes for the future had died in the most human way possible, by the folly of humans themselves. Still, as much as you wanted to spend the months on end searching through the code to find what had gone wrong, you couldn’t. You still had a life to live. It had taken you five years to make something that was even semi-capable of functioning and you had a team working alongside you the entire time. It would take another fifty years if you went to find that glitch alone. Not to mention, touching that code was illegal in more ways than one. It wasn’t your property. As much as you considered the IRIS the brain child of you, Kyle, and the eight others you worked with, it belonged to the deceased Omnica Corporation. You had no legal rights to it. You could build from it, move forward with the same concept, but touching all those years’ worth of code would have you thrown in jail, even if you did… maybe save a copy of it somewhere.

So you moved on. You grew, you aged, you matured just a little and shed a few too many tears for what you had lost. You allowed yourself to shed that dream of changing the world and instead looked to just make a life for yourself now, even if the thoughts of the past ‘what-ifs’ haunted you. Those that had been forced to leave Omnica formed their own development program, albeit much smaller. You found that it never quiet felt like home, even if everyone there had once worked with you or near you. Different projects were taken up, some groups moving on to fields of particle acceleration, others branching into methods of cryostatis, biomedical engineering and medicine, or just more laid back robotics. You couldn’t find it in your heart to work for them full time, even if you took a gig every now and then. You needed to pay the bills but there was a lot less here to dream about than Omnica once offered. It wasn’t really your thing either. You love AI, you had for years. This, what you were doing here, was not AI.

So, in the end, freelancing seemed your best bet. Whenever they had a project that needed advanced coding on, they would call you in for a few months and you would work until it was done. You got used to casual conversation with people who you would never see when away from work. It became easy to just be friends in the moment. After all, you were still young. You could still figure out what you wanted to do with your life moving forward. You were twenty seven for goodness sakes and all your adult life had been working on one goal. Now… you just needed to find something better to do. Until then, you would freelance here and keep looking for that thing.

\---------------------

 

Still, how did that translate to where you were now? Breathing as quietly as possible, unable to move, unable to think, trying to hide because if they found you, it was certain you would join in on the screams echoing off the hallway. Your ears were ringing, a side effect of the bomb that blew up the side of the office you were working in currently. The explosion had shattered the otherwise peaceful monotony of the day, the friendly banter and quiet conversation over coding and phone calls.

It had hit like a bullet truck. Somewhere to your left, a thunderous sound exploded from the quiet, muffling everything in its ringing tone. The building shook as everyone fell to the floor, fire alarms sounding, the floor reverberated the impact. Panic. Nausea flooding your system as your first thought was that it was a terrorist attack. What else would it be? This place wasn’t Omnica but it did have important and critical research that was being developed. Breakthroughs lately had been happening from all different types of departments. The area of partial acceleration had shown extreme promise and there had recently been good news coming from a team that was researching the concepts of time travel and black holes. Not your area but you were happy for them at the time.

Now, however, you were terrified that whatever they had been working on, had led to all of this.

You hit the deck like everyone else, hands covering your head as you scream. At the time, you allowed yourself to yell, though the ringing in your ears was painful enough to cause a headache on an ordinary day.

The next thought was to get out of there, to run, and you followed the instinct. You shot up from your desk and ran, not grabbing anything as you go. No one thought about purses or whatever when their lives were on the line. So you ran for the nearest door, following behind several people who had the same idea.

You weaved through several of hallways that normally seemed short and simple to you but today… today they felt like a maze you wouldn’t get out of. Where was the exit? Who knows. How do you get out? Who knows. The exit had to be here somewhere though.

You started to hear bullets. Shots from some kind of gun all around you. Screams start up with new vigor and you could almost feel the pain of those whose voices gurgled off into nothing. Yet you saw no attackers in your frantic sprint down an abandoned stairwell. At least, you saw nothing until you nearly collided with a body far more sturdy than your own.

A red eye stared at you when you glanced up in a panic, about to yell at the person to move, to run. One red eye that burned into your soul which held no emotion but anger and death. Like a reaper of souls, those red lights tore through you and left you far more breathless than the run down had.

It was not simply that it was the enemy before you, the ones that were slaughtering your coworkers, but that you recognized them. It. You had seen it made from beginning to end, you had spent hour programming its key components from scratch.

Why were the Omnium here? As far as you were aware, they had been stored away in various facilities around the globe, operations shut down and systems powered off forever. Omnica was shut down, it had been for two years at this point. Why were these things here?

And why did this one now turn a rifle in its hand solely towards you?

There is a thing about fight or flight that kicks in at the sight of the gun. All questions, all thoughts, they speed by in a millisecond and none of them matter. All that is important was your own life and how you choose to act.  Time does seem to slow when faced with the end of a gun. The world seems to shatter, breaking down to its key components of emotions, thoughts, and reality and god, none of it mattered because you were going to die, weren’t you.

No, not now. Not now, please.

But who were you even begging to? The silence in the span of your single heartbeat as you look at the Omnium in front of you, the creature you had played such a role to make, was evidence that there was no one to listen to you beg. You had to live on your own terms or you would die, here and now.

So you move.

Your leg shoots out, kicking as hard as possible at the middle of the Omniums right leg, trying your best to knock it off balance. Get it to fall down the stairwell, maybe then you could make a run for it. It worked, sort of. A deafeningly loud screech echoed as the bullet that was intended for your chest darted by you, ricocheting off the concrete walls of the stairwell and bouncing to god knows where. The Omnium had lost its balance, the kick sending it stumbling down maybe three or four steps at most. The robots were built with a gyroscope stabilizer, they wouldn’t just go falling down like an old video game robot might.

But it was still something. Whether or not it would be enough was unsure but you turned all the same, running back up the stairs the way you came. Sure, the obvious exit was down toward ground floor but the Omnium was also down that direction. You couldn’t go there. Maybe there was a window you could jump out of farther up and survive. All you knew was that down wasn’t an option.

So back up the stairs you ran, making as tight of movements as you can as you hear the Omnium stabilize and start heading up after you, metal limbs sounding hauntingly against the concrete steps beneath you. There was still the constant echo of bullets from outside the stairwell as well, faint but present. A reminder that you weren’t safe even if you got out of here without being shot by the robot on your tail.

You yank open the first exit door you can find, barely glancing at the sign as you stumble into the new floor. It wasn’t one you were on very often, much to your dismay. It was the quantum mechanics and space section of the corporation. Not your field of expertise, you weren’t even sure how to navigate anywhere.

White walls and scattered paper along the hallways were all you witnessed as you ran forward, picking a random direction to try to find a way out in. Maybe you would get lucky and the layout would be similar to the programming departments cubicle set up.

Or not.

Definitely not.

It was all labs, god damn it. Large computers in one room, open set ups with desks and testing tables. You could see something similar to a mechanics room through a small glass window as you bolt by, none of it making any real sense. The further you go into the area, however, the more the air starts to fill with smoke. Fire alarms had started to beep loudly in your ears, falling in to back fill all the other noise that was constantly surrounding you. Clearly you were entering the side of the building that the explosion had occurred.

A deep itch began to tickle your throat and sting at the back of your eyes, causing you to cough as you run. The lack of oxygen from the exercise coupled with the thickening smoke as beginning to make you wheeze. You couldn’t go any farther.

And all of this stress, this panic, was multiplied by the ever present thought that the Omnium was probably right behind you. Hell, there were probably more throughout the building. Guns, the screams, if there was one of them there was probably more hurting everyone else they could get their hands on.

You had to stop. Find a place to hide. Survive.

You ended up shoving aside a door that had come partially off its hinges to get inside what appeared to be a technology testing area. Desks and table had formed piles in the explosion; likely caused either from people shoving them aside or perhaps an Omnium had already passed through here and destroyed things as it went. The plastered ceiling had begun to crumble upon itself. Different devices that you couldn’t put a name too scattered the floor. Sparks seemed to issue from a few of them, probably broken as well from the impact.

But you didn’t have much time to worry about that. You had to hide.

The desks were your most valid option. Crawl under them, in them, find a pile that would make room for your short stature and just pray. This is exactly what you did. A large metal table and what you assumed was a mechanics desk had formed a strange overlapping pyramid along that you could hide under without being seen from the front door. It was the best you could manage.

You crawl under, holding your breath as you raise your shirt to your mouth, the material drenched in sweat but still capable of blocking out some of the hints of smoke that you could tell were beginning to bloom at the ceiling.

And then you were still. Utterly, totally still. You tried not to breathe, you tried not to move. Your hands were shaking, your heart beat so high that you were sure you would have a heart attack if the adrenaline in your system was not keeping you from imploding.

A scream sounded down the hallway.

For the first time, you take real note of the screams. It wasn’t as if you hadn’t heard them but now they were catching up to you. You had thought everyone would have fled to the bottom floors and out. You hadn’t seen anyone on your run he-

You pause mid thought, back tracking through your run from the stairwell to here. You had thought you were alone, the Omnium and you. You had thought in those moments that it was a 1v1, just you and it. Thinking on it now, however, it was clear that wasn’t true. You had tunnel visioned. There were people running down the stairwell, the Omnium had been chasing them. There were people sprinting down the hallway towards the exit as you pushed your way up onto this floor. You just… you hadn’t seen them.

It felt like you had been alone in the world even if you weren’t.

What about at the point of the explosion somewhere down farther into the building? Were there people there stuck and trapped? Had the Omnium used that point as an entrance and now there were people who couldn’t escape?

You had been blind in your terror and your shock to everyone else, too concerned for your own safety to even see them. Now, the scream that sounded of such pain, not too far away, reminded you of the real reality of the situation.

You bite down hard on your hand, to the point where blood laced your tongue.

You didn’t know what was going on here, why the things you helped to build were here so suddenly, attacking the people you would, though casually, call friends.

And there were footsteps. Sounds of metal clanking and bullets firing in the distance, down the hallway, not too far from here.

Bang, Bang, Scream.

The sound of bullets whizzing through the air, voices filled with pain.

Bang. Bang. Silence.

More bullets though nothing came after them except the sound of metal footsteps coming closer, fire alarms beeping out warnings constantly. There were no human noises anymore.

Sparks continued to fly faster from some of the devices to your left, sparking off one another. Another tremor wrecked the building as you hid there, trying not to make a noise that would alert anyone to your presence in the otherwise empty room. Another explosion? It felt further off but the very floor vibrated with the intensity of it. Were they bombing the place?

Footsteps. More footsteps shuffling somewhere out in the hallway, the Omniums clearly trying not to hide their presence.

One of the machines to your right broke the otherwise patterned noises, beginning to give out a familiar warning signal, the beeping a long drone followed by a short silence and then repeat. You could see a panel on the back wall from your hiding spot flashing red, the very color of danger. The sparking from some of the panels on the back wall next to it began to grow more frequent.

Was it going to explode too? Should you run? What were your chances on living in here hiding versus going out where the Omnium and whoever else was attacking stalked the halls?

After a seconds thought, you figured you would take your chances with a device that might or might not explode.

Still, the noise was not doing you any favors. The fire alarm might do something to mask the red warning signal from the device but noise was still noise to the Omnium. The clank of metal got closer. The sound of sirens got louder from the machines. Closer comes the footsteps, louder becomes the sirens.

You bite down hard to keep yourself silent and still, not moving an inch, trying not to even shiver as the chill runs up your spine.

And then one of the duo noises stops. The footsteps end and you can’t breathe anymore, so sure of your fate. The noises had been close, just outside the doorway to this lab. So close you knew that it had to be looking in to see why the alarm on whatever hell like machine was being built in this section of the building. It had to be.

The smoke burns your throat but if you breathe, it might hear you. If you shift slightly, it might hear you. If you blink, hell, maybe it might hear you. It felt like you were being stalked by something that you couldn’t escape from and never would. You would die here.

Blaring sirens surround you and your ears continue to ring. The noises that had filled the air were enough to cause you to go deaf not to mention you were sure the first explosion had left some permanent fuzzy sounds in your ears.

Don’t move. Don’t move.

You hear it again.

Step, clank. Step, clank. The reverberating of a metal body entering the sparking, hazy room that screamed of warnings and death.

 What had you done in life to deserve this? All you had ever wanted to do was build something that would help the world. This was your nightmare though. The very things you helped make were spawned years later to not only mentally haunt you but to take you down in one single moment.

Step, clank, step.

It stopped moving, way too close to your hiding spot. Did it see you, curled up in a small little ball underneath a table and a desk, watching wires spark on a distant wall? Did it see you or was it too focused on a strange yellow glow that the largest machine in the room was making, connected by half the wires that were seemingly not yet destroyed.

You could see the machine but not the Omnium, unsure where it stood. Any second it could put a bullet through your brain if it knows where you are. A low distinct creak of joints moving, sounding surprisingly aged and underused comes from your left, only five or ten feet away.

You close your eyes for a second, thinking about your family. Those that would miss you when you were gone. Your siblings, so smart and caring, one still in college and the other soon to be married. Your mother who you called only a few days ago to talk about coming home for your birthday. Your dad who you missed but had been too busy to talk to the last time he had called.

Step. Step.

It stopped again and you open your eyes.

You were dead. You could see a single red eye peered down at the hiding spot from only a foot away, clearly seeing you at the angle it was now at. There would be no escape this time, no way to shimmy out or knock it over. A gun in the robots hands seemed to snap slightly to life, pointed towards you.

There was no mercy in its eye.

The alarms around you blared even louder, creating a crescendo of ultimate panic and alarm. A golden haze seemed to fill your vision as the gun was raised to point at you.

No mercy, no hope.

With a blaring screams of death, heat filled the air, seeming to burst out from around the Omnium. Gold and yellow, a burst of pain. The noises ceased.

You only wished you could have said goodbye.

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> Please sit back and enjoy; this will be a long ride.


End file.
